Two things here. The first is a bunch of outtakes from Step Brothers. Because, Step Brothers and Steenburgen. And the one I want to show you is first up. The rest is gratuitous fun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zqvjmFcztw

The second is in case you can’t be arsed watching Last Vegas just to see and hear Ms Steenburgen sing. (Her middle name is Nell, by the way). The story goes that in recent years she had an operation on her arm, came out of the anaesthetic, and was seized by the urge to write and play music. For some reason she chose the accordion as the instrument of this awakening. This is her live. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxj2oofQffo

This is here because I reviewed the Blu-ray version of 22 Jump St for Phil Wakefield’s Screenscribe site. For that scintillating piece of cinematical reviewership, go here. http://www.screenscribe.net/

An now to the extras.

Rob Riggle is one of the 17,000 people who currently rule much of the global media after breaking out on Saturday Night Live.

He is not to be confused with Patrick Warburton who played Puddy on Seinfeld.

If you do mistake one for the other, this is unlikely to ever be socially embarrassing as the odds of you meeting even one of them are so remote it makes more sense to start saving now for the engagement ring to put on Mila Kunis’s finger after you steal her away from Ashton Kutcher. If you are a heterosexual female reading this, I can’t even start to think of any similarly unlikely scenario that might apply to you. But it would have to be pretty bloody unlikely. And if you’re a gay guy, well, I guess you can aim for Ashton. You can see where I am going. Down the gurgler.

Anyway, this is a tribute to The Riggle. First up, if you have just watched 22 Jump Street without watching 21 Jump St (and really, don’t, as there are many, many linked gags) this scene from that makes sense of much which is to come about prison, man-ginas and the like. (Little exposition is needed except to say Mr Walters was the bastard phys ed teacher at the school Jonah Hill and Tatum Channing were infiltrating in 21.)

Next up is Riggle in 22 Jump St when Hill and Tatum go to him for some advice about a case. Shot in a real jail, the guard behind them was the actual warden. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller said it was a pointless and terrifying waste of time and they resolved to always shoot prison scenes on a set in future.

If you watch the Blu-ray extras, you’ll see how much of this was Riggle ad-libbing. It’s very funny. And only mildly wildly obscene.

And now, a bit from him in one of the great movies of modern times, Step Brothers. This is a deleted scene. God knows why, it only adds to the greatness. And it explains the true importance of the Catalina Wine Mixer.

Here is Mr Long talking about writing the score in an interview from November 2013 on RNZ. It’s 20 minutes and goes into the writing, the filmmaking process as well as bits from the Everest story, which is chock full of drama and general mountain climbing craziness.

“The first thing [producer] Matthew [Metcalfe] said to me was: ‘If you think of Everest and Ed Hillary, there’s an obvious score, isn’t there. There’s an obvious sort of soundtrack.’ I went yeah. He said: ‘Don’t do it’.”

I got my copy of the soundtrack from Slow Boat Records in Wellington, but I see it is also available at Victoria University Press.

“A Beekeeper from Tuakau” and “Summiting” are my favourite tracks. A nice mix of delicacy and strength. They almost, but don’t quite, convince me to take on a razor-sharp, icy peak surrounded by bottomless crevasses.

In my defence, the novelisation of SAMBT dragged a bit after Janet and I split up and the world became a dark and sucky place relieved rather a little too much by the application of cheap Aussie shiraz to my brain and liver regions.
This is a coping mechanism with its own built-in issues and curbs on productivity of the writing kind. Well, for me – I don’t want this to be some kind of prescriptive thing and I am sure plenty of people write fantastically well while on their second bottle, whereas by that stage I am down to my undies playing the ukulele. Poorly.
But as the picture shows, there’s a lot more light of late. Perhaps not as much as a sunrise on mars. But enough for me to get off my finely toned bottom and get rid of the goddam SAMBT albatross. Besides, it’s looking ok. To my great surprise.

For those of you who prefer your Kiwi Space Patrol adventures in book form, I am into about chapter eight of Super Awesome Mega Battle Tank [The Novel]. It was started a couple of years ago as part of the Kiwi Writers “Bang out a Novel in a Month” contest in which I was soundly beaten by Lindsay Mutch who was coming into work and crapping on about how he’d pounded out another 5000 words overnight. Well,right up till he got a fatal chest infection.

I kind of lost any enthusiasm then. Truth be told, all his stuff is better than mine AND by the looks of it, he hardly ever edited it. Rotten, gifted bastard. There you go folks, great talent is no shield against the scythe of the reaper. Hopefully I will get it printed in some form to go with a novel he wrote a number of years ago. It was about ghosts and rats and an ancient demon.

Anyway, SAMBT should be done within three months and then I will format it for distribution, maybe as a pdf and/or via Amazon for the Kindle et al. It won’t cost a penny, but its value shall be great.

For our sins, most of the KSP crew reassembled last weekend to shoot a 5 minute film for the V48 Hour Filmmaking competition.
The gods gave us the genre of Musical, and we came up with Savage Tron Love Wrongs, which was a musical interpretation of an unhappy episode Liz had with a man whose name starts with C.

If I had checked that Ulead 11 could handle high def footage before finding out that it actually can’t, thereby condemning Cormac to editing it all in three hours, it may have been better than it was. It certainly would have included the key money shot of his tongue giving what-ho to Cath Morrison’s tonsils. (Well done Cath, brilliant acting and solid gag reflect control). Alas, that is somewhere in some folder languishing. It hindsight it seems a basic kind of preparation, but it just seemed to elude my planning schedule, which as with most things, means grabbing everything five minutes before Go Hour and saying it’ll all be fixed in post.

Anyway, the Saturday was a long day and everyone dug it in and provided some great shots.
Ali Murray and Millie Wilson were there too, Millie doing makeup, Alison as runner and painting a large obscene message on my back lawn, in the name of art, Gemma Crouch-Gatehouse, Aaron created the sock puppets, and there was Shane Wilson, Janet Glenn, Chris Nixon, with Liz Cossar singing the song to the music written by Max Apse. Ask me about checking audio recording gear as well, one day. Steven Qian did a fab job of creating printed props, and Cormac was awesome in his mullet. All we needed was Alex T. next time, should there be one.

Rough cut version that it was I think the outro could have been dropped. The V competition stipulates certain elements be included in it, and we did the required freeeze frame but I think it would have been better left on Cath’s face by the sea.
I’ll post a link when we YouTube it. In fact, we’ll probably do the show cut, a Cormac cut, and my version. For no other reason than to flog this dying horse.

Of the 10 movies shown at the premier’s last night, I think ours was in the middle of the pack. A couple were obviously beaten by the time limit. Janet liked Baddass, which was a clever take on the body switch gentre, and it probably was the slickest and most entertaining.